IT is defined broadly as “technologies dedicated to information storage, processing, and communications” Ang et al. (1997), that is, a combination of hardware, software, telecommunications and office equipment to transform raw data into useful information for speedy retrieval. In recent years, the construction industry in Malaysia seems to be using the Internet as much as other industries. In line with the National IT Agenda, which was formulated in 1996, the Malaysian Government has been aggressively promoting IT and its application in every sector including the construction industry. The Mid-Term Review of The Seventh Malaysia Plan 1996-2000 reported RM152 million (US$40 million) investment in IT from the construction sector in 1995 but there was a sharp decline in 1998 where investment in IT from the construction sector was at RM48 million (US$12.6 million).
Malaysia was connected to the Internet in 1990 when the Internet Service Provider (ISP) JARING was launched by MIMOS Berhad. In 1996, Telekom Malaysia launched the country’s second ISP, which is TMNet. (Rahmah, 1999). In addition, various portals targeting the construction industry such as Icfox, Binaonline.com, Buildcom.net and Construction Asia have emerged in recent years.
The construction sector, in 1997, contributed 10.6% to the national GDP, second only to the services sector (11.06%) with the manufacturing sector a close third (10.1%). However, this sector suffered a contraction of 23.0% and 5.6% in 1998 and 1999, respectively. Efforts to revive the sector helped it to turnaround in 2000, contributing RM6,996 million (US$1,841 million) which is 3.3% of the national GDP (Eighth Malaysia Plan, 2001).
Currently, the total contracting firms registered with CIDB are in the region of 41,500 firms (CIDB, 2001). The registration of contractors are divided by category, starting from G1 for contractors qualified to tender for works not exceeding RM100,000 (US$26,317) to G7 where there is no limit to the value of work that the contractors under this category are eligible to tender (G6 contractors are allowed to tender for works not exceeding RM10million in value only). For the purpose of our survey, we are only focussing on the G7 contractors, which number 1,643 companies. Development companies registered with the Real Estate and Housing Developer Association are in the region of 800 companies. The professional firms that are involved in this sector that are registered with the various professional boards amount to about 3,083 firms. The professional firms include architect firms, town planning firms, engineering firms, quantity surveying firms and valuation firms.
To support such construction process, the stakeholders will utilize IT to simulate, analyze, and evaluate the expected performance of the facility design, the design of the facilities delivery process including design and construction schedule and the design of the organization carrying out the process. These simulations, analyses, and evaluations should be based on an integrated model describing the designed facility, organization, and process. The simulation, analysis, and evaluation results should then be visualized so that the results make clear what the tradeoffs are between optimizing the facility, organization, and process design for a particular discipline vs. the overall project for the wide range of criteria typically found on construction projects. IT should also support automation of the generation of the input for simulation, analysis, and evaluation and automate the simulations, analyses, and evaluations as much as possible. Eventually, IT will support the optimization of a project’s design from the perspective of multiple disciplines.
IT also needs to cover the design of the product include facility, project scope, the project organization carrying out the design and construction, and the process to carry out the project. These scope called ‘integrated POP design’, where POP stands for product, organization, and process. As the examples illustrate many decisions involve tradeoffs between product, organization, and process design. The reason for making the product, organization, and process of a project in the main scope of IT is that project stakeholders can decide what to build, who should build it how, and when to build it and the product, organization, and process design are the independent variables on a project. These decisions then lead to a particular performance of the integrated POP design with respect to cost, safety, and other project criteria. These performance predictions provide the yardstick to evaluate the relative and absolute merits of a particular design. Such an integrated POP design requires the modeling of the systems and components that make up the product, the actors, teams, task assignments, and other organizational aspects, and the activities that comprise the design, construction, and operations processes. The activities provide the main glue between the product design and the organization, since each component of the product design leads to one or several activities for its design, construction, and operation, and each actor or team in the project organization is assigned to one or several tasks.
There is another software that have innovate the construction industry but not available in Malaysia that is Building Information Models. These types of models support the exchange of data between software tools to speed up analysis cycle times and reduce data input and transfer errors. Their set-up, testing, and use cannot typically be financed on a project basis, but rather requires corporate funding. For example one innovative engineering company has been employing about 10% of its engineering staff in its R&D group to make their software and design methods based on product models and to learn how to use product model information other project participants produce to their benefit. When successfully deployed, the ability to reuse project data to do more work with the same budget or the same work with far less budget should provide a competitive advantage that is more sustainable than that gained from visual models.
As a conclusion, from this platform it is possible to construct a scenario or vision of how IT may enable construction products and processes to be more competitively procured in the future. This vision is currently informing ongoing research and innovation within IT for construction. It has a relevance to research much more widely in building and construction. Researchers in many of the other areas covered might look to examine this vision to identify the extent to which it informs and influences in Malaysian construction industry.
Rahmah Hashim and Arfah Yusof (1999). Internet in Malaysia [online]. Interasia. Available from:http://www.interasia.org/malaysia/hashim-yusof.html [accessed 27 March 2001]
Construction Industry Review 1999/2000 (2001). Construction Industry Development Board Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Wan Suhana Abdullah Saimi
2009185923
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